All Good in the Neighbourhood? Exploring the Role of Local Conditions for Political Trust and Corruption Perceptions within a Minority Context

Members of a minority population are expected to evaluate political authorities through a differentspectrum than majority members. Still, only a few studies have explored the role of local conditions asdeterminants for political attitudes among a linguistic minority population. This study focuses on the roleof linguistic homogeneity, local economic conditions and community size as determinants for corruptionperceptions and political trust at the individual level among members of a linguistic minority population:the Swedish-speaking Finns. Moreover, this study differs empirically between evaluations of the local andnational authorities. Combining data from a panel survey collected byBarometern(2019–21) withvarying contextual-level factors in a multilevel model, we show that evaluations of local authorities arerelated to local contextual factors, in particular municipal unemployment rates and median incomes,while national evaluations are largely unrelated to local conditions. In contrast to theoreticalexpectations for an in-group bias among minority members, however, wefind no effect for linguistichomogeneity on corruption perceptions and political trust after controlling for economic conditions. Theresults make an important contribution to our understanding about the role of local conditions forpolitical attitudes among a well-assimilated minority population